Holocaust

Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust is a literary experiment that is affective to haunting proportions. I think that his approach is really unique but I’m still not convinced I would call it poetry necessarily. When I think of poetry, I tend to think someone’s own creative, imaginative words and phrases. I don’t think this takes away from Holocaust at all. For me, the fact that it is 100% objective analysis of the Holocaust makes it even more powerful. The Holocaust was so horrific that one would find it difficult to make up such atrocities. For example, I found “The S.S. man laughed and tore the baby apart as one would tear a rag” especially gruesome. Then, it shows where Reznikoff got the words for that and it was straight out of testimony. Fiction couldn’t paint such a graphic picture. It scares me to think that human capability can stretch so far, that humans have committed such heinous acts that I don’t believe could even be imagined by a person writing fiction. Reznikoff, poetry or not, reveals through stark realism the sheer horror that surrounded the Holocaust.